1000 Business Lessons Every Businessman Must Know

Chapter 28 Brand Management: A Good Brand Is Made through Management (1)
[-]. How to create a good brand
226. Find out what consumers know about brands
The first job of building a brand is to find out what consumers perceive the brand to be and what they think it stands for.

Manco researched how consumers in the US market perceive their Duck brand and how they feel about it.

The results were more optimistic than their expectations. The research showed that although Duck was not particularly famous, he felt mostly positive.This is a good start for a brand building campaign, at least not without changing people's perception of brand image. Duck is known as:

(1) Be imaginative.

(2) Smart and flexible.

(3) Beneficial.

(4) Friendliness.

(5) Humor.

After understanding consumers' perception of Duck, Manco's advertising and marketing managers can then decide how to position the Duck brand.A key aspect is utilizing Duck in a consistent manner so that all related products become friendly, helpful members of the Duck family.That's been a challenge because the company's products span home, office, and DIY, including tapes, adhesives, cleaners, packing materials, and more.

In 2000, Duck debuted in Europe in Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkey, as well as Australia and the Philippines.Manco's largest customer, Weiming Shopping Mall, took Duck and followed them to develop globally—to Canada, Mexico, and South America.

227. Build a consumer base

Many companies use clubs to gather and increase user communities with high brand loyalty.The most famous example is the Harley Owners Group of Harley Motorcycles, whose name echoes the nickname many people have for Harley motorcycles.Parties, grand prix races and the same style of clothing are all factors that create a customer community with strong brand loyalty.

Another example is the Casadoni Club, an organization Nestlé uses to entice consumers to its pasta products.This enabled the 100-year-old Italian dough company CasaBuitoni to establish the CasaBuitoni Club in 2002. After launching the advertising campaign of "Sharing the Passion for Italian Food", brand awareness and sales increased dramatically.Members can receive recipes, discount coupons, take advantage of free consultation hotline and other preferential measures.

228. Comprehensive utilization of advertising and promotional activities
Pepsi has its own brand of mineral water, Alfina, and soon, Coca-Cola also launched its Dashani brand.The names are carefully chosen with vague connotations and sound like great value for money - they're really just a filtered, corked bottle of water, just like the water you drink at home, just with packaging , and delivered to your hand in a convenient and portable way.

Coca-Cola's huge distribution system has helped Dashani's listing. Consumers spent $2000 billion on mineral water in 42, a market that continues to grow as health-conscious consumers turn to pure water or a variety of artificial juices.

Therefore, it is quite reasonable for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the two major cold drink companies, to want to have their own mineral water brands. With the proper use of distribution influence, they got their wish.

229. Having an easy-to-remember name or image
The Smoke Company is a leading manufacturer of jams and jellies.They decided to use the company's uncommon name as the centerpiece of a brand-building campaign. "With a name like Smoke on it, it must be a good thing!" was their theme.The results are surprising.Smok's is now a well known and accepted premium brand of supermarket jams and jellies.

Heinz Ketchup utilizes a different memory factor—namely, the great-looking bottle, the consistency of the product, and its wide distribution to fine restaurants and caterers.Heinz Ketchup comes in its own unique bottle, not one of those unbranded containers that everyone knows might hold some thin ketchup.Hands used TV commercials to reinforce the impression that their ketchup was thick rather than poured thin.The ad shows a person waiting for (thick) Heinz ketchup to trickle out of an attractive bottle.The brand is built on this image from distribution to promotion and advertising.

230. Basic principles of brand name design

The manufacturer of the brand must choose the name of the brand.Brand name design should follow the following principles.

1. Simple and eye-catching, easy to remember
Although registered trademarks are protected by law, a well-reputed trademark with complicated patterns is often easy for speculators to take advantage of, because as long as a few subtle changes are made on the trademark, it is enough to confuse the real one.

2. Novel and unique, easy to identify

Brand design should strive to be novel in conception and beautiful in shape, with distinctive features and artistry, and avoid vulgarity and complexity.The so-called novelty must also have obvious differences from other brands, reflect the characteristics of the company or products, be easy for consumers to identify, and not easy to imitate.At the same time, we must pay attention to conforming to the laws and customs and being popular with the masses.

China's product brand names generally fall into the following categories:

(1) Named after people, such as Li Ning.

(2) Named after flowers, birds and animals, such as "Panda".

(3) Named after geometric figures, such as "five rings".

(4) Named with abstract nouns, such as "happiness" and "association".

(5) Name it with words that contain meaning, such as "Wanjiale" and "Quanjude".

(6) Named after the function of the product or service, such as "Jieeryin".

(7) Name it after the target customer group, such as "Wahaha".

(8) Named with homonyms in foreign languages, such as "Santana".

(9) Named after the place of origin or place name, such as "Moutai".

3. Easy to pronounce, good for general use
Short and easy-to-pronounce brand names are another fundamental principle of brand design.Such as Coca-Cola (CocaCola), Pepsi-Cola (PepsiCola) are both easy to pronounce and easy to remember, and have become the world's best-selling beverage labels.Some brands are easy to pronounce and common in the marketer's home market, but encounter obstacles in brand promotion in the international market.For example, "Pearl River Bridge" is translated into English "PearlRiverBridge", which is long and awkward, which is not conducive to the promotion and popularization of the brand in the international market.

4. Cooperate with customs, easy to accept

Product brand design, including brand names, patterns, symbols and colors, must also consider whether it can conform to local customs in domestic and foreign markets, and try to avoid other implicit inappropriateness.

[-]. How to build brand influence
231. How to Measure Brand Awareness

How to measure brand awareness?Measuring brand awareness can tell us how strong a brand is in the minds of consumers.There are the following commonly used measures of brand awareness:

1. First choice

Without any encouragement or mention of any possible brand name, the first brand that comes to mind in the survey, usually expressed as a percentage of eligible subjects.Some subjects cannot be included in the analysis if they do not meet the sample division principles of demographic variables or regional variables, otherwise the results will be distorted.Sometimes also called brand advantage.

2. Not prompting popularity
A single brand within a given product or service category that appears in the survey without any encouragement or suggestion of possible brand names, expressed as a percentage of eligible respondents.Sometimes called brand memory.

3. Post-prompt visibility
Brands recognized after providing a form with a list of brand names, possibly of a particular product or service, expressed as a percentage of eligible subjects.Sometimes called brand awareness.

4. Highlight the brand
The order in which brands come to mind is not how consumers view brands, but how they actually think of them and the order in which they come to mind.

There are many other ways to describe brand awareness, but almost all of them are variations or combinations of the above 1~3.

232. How to Build a Strong Brand

Strong brands that have stood for many years can often survive longer than the company that created them.Brands are built incrementally, first having to build post-tip awareness, then untipped awareness starts to grow, and finally becomes the top choice, but the process can be very slow.Ongoing and long-lasting advertising and promotional campaigns are necessary to keep going.

According to the brand awareness survey report, the percentages of respondents' familiarity with specific products and markets are divided according to the first choice, unprompted popularity and post-prompted popularity.In this kind of investigation, it is indeed very important to select the sample properly, and how representative the sample is to the overall market population we want to know is quite critical.

233. Use sexy to help brands sell

In the discussion of persuasion in psychology, there is a psychology called "similar attraction", which describes a phenomenon that people will give higher evaluation or stronger evaluation to people who look similar or attractive to themselves. sense of trust.That's why models or beautiful people are often called to shoot advertisements or act as product spokespersons.

Katrina Carrey, the female chief executive of Transworld Computer Software, once spent all of the company's advertising budget on magazine ads.Jia Rui is a charming woman. In the advertisement, she wears a simple and fitted black dress with a V-neck, which is still fresh in my memory. Does she help the brand?Of course, it helps for a short time.When an advertisement makes people impressed, but they can't remember the brand name, it can't help but make people wonder what the purpose of the advertisement is. Isn't it to create brand awareness and enhance brand image?

There’s an ad shot years ago that does just the opposite, when English Leather cologne and shaves share a glamorous blonde model who simply says, “My man only wears English Leather… or nothing at all.” Allure person?Absolutely!But best of all, it makes people remember the brand name.

Still, sexy ads with graphics or low taste rarely do well.They disgust the majority and interest only a few.If these lecherous few are the target audience, this ad will work for them, but it's a risky approach to building a brand.

234. Carry out careful market research
Market research is an important step in obtaining the information you need to build your brand.Doing market research is more than just asking certain people questions.Some information is available this way, but it's foolish to use it to make major decisions.This is not a place for amateurs to fish in muddy waters.When conducting market research, it is important to have a well-designed questionnaire, because a poorly designed questionnaire can distort the results and induce subjects to make different responses.Making decisions based on such biased answers can lead to very poor decisions!
Selecting a representative sample of respondents is the first step, followed by determining the sample size and desired statistical reliability.The larger the sample, the more certain the sample results are representative of the entire population, but the research cost is also higher.How to select qualified subjects as the target population is another important research topic.If possible, it is best to use the fewest questions to measure whether they are eligible. The purpose of research is to spend time and cost on answering questions.

Written surveys are quite sensitive to poor design because of the lack of subject-interviewer interaction.Poorly trained interviewers can also affect results, resulting in inaccurate answers.Again, this is not a place for amateurs to experiment. There are too many factors that can affect the results of market research and brand research, leading to sloppy research and wrong conclusions.

Now, this topic is brought up because when a brand is developing, a series of influencing factors, including brand awareness, brand preference and brand loyalty, all need to be investigated.Information on brand awareness comes almost entirely from surveys of a representative population of potential and existing buyers of the target product or service.

235. Measuring Brand Preference
(End of this chapter)